Andrej Blatnik - Too Close Together

A man and a woman, nameless throughout Andrej Blatnik's Too Close Together, are preparing to leave their country. The man is painstakingly forging the woman's passport while she writes the necessary notes to family and friends, and packs their belongings. Menace hangs over them, the menace of war, or oppression, or perhaps the ordinary menace of forbidden love. At any rate, they must leave, and soon – tomorrow.

But there is an oppressive nature to leaving, too. To flee one's country and settle in another carries with it the great burden of their relationship concentrating into their entire world. Depending upon where the couple will end up they may have only each other to talk to in their own language, may only know one another for a very long time, and the possibility of the relationship dissolving becomes, thanks to the force of necessity, close to impossible. They are intertwined closer than marriage, closer than family. Once they leave, that's it.

The man lies in bed, staring at the ceiling, imagining the many possible courses events may take. Thinking about the body of the woman sleeping by his side. About the days and years to come. He can picture some sort of bungalow, with plenty of framed photographs on the walls, a door opening onto a garden, a lot of washing hanging there to dry. The picture is very vivid, his nostrils even fill with something akin to the smell of home-cooked soup. The kind of coziness usually found only in old family snapshots. He wishes for children's laughter to ring out in the background of the picture, for letters from abroad. And he feels slumber washing over him.

The man, from whom the narrative takes its perspective, vacillates between desiring children, home comforts and security, to perceiving their upcoming emigration as a noose tightening around his neck. It soon becomes clear that they are, in fact, fleeing violence – throughout the night the crack of gunshot is heard, and the building shakes from nearby explosions. But is forced intimacy the same as an intimacy which is chosen and nurtured during freer times?

”Is your mind made up?” he says.
The woman's eyes betray surprise.
“I made up my mind a long time ago,” she says. “Long ago.”
“I mean,” he amends, “you haven't changed your mind? Because if you have … This is your last chance. You know.”

We feel the weight of events spiraling out of control for the man. Blatnik carefully walks the (very) thin line between making the narrator's thoughts clear. He is a man in turmoil, not a man decided – and this comes across quite effectively. The man worries at creating the perfect passport and alibi, while simultaneously watching the woman with dread, aware that his actions will force their relationship to extend into the stultifying proximity of the wandering refugee.

The woman in the passenger seat, whose eyes are sunken from months of hunger and fear, seems as beautiful as the angel of destruction to the man. Just like the first time he laid eyes on her.

Much like in Blatnik's masterful You Do Understand, the author shows himself to be attuned to the contradictory nature of relationships and the unsettling feeling one never truly banishes that perhaps it is all some joke, as though a fracture has occurred and one's life didn't quite take the path it was meant to. Blatnik realises that relationships are based on chance as much as choice, and circumstances as much as passion or commitment. When it comes down to it, the girl you meet at the dance could just as well have been the girl ten steps to the right, or to the left. And, truthfully, you could just as easily have been another potential suitor asking for her hand. But you weren't, and now you are here, and then a life has gone by, with children, mortgages, decades, death.

Blatnik writes with sensitivity to their situation while refraining from moralising or casting judgment. Neither the man or the woman are portrayed as particularly good, evil, or otherwise – they are simply reacting to a difficult situation and, as occurs too often, projecting the folly of future decades onto the innocent present. And yet, though the story surrounds the evening before they leave their nameless country, and the actual process of leaving, tempers never flare, no specific conflict is aired. Blatnik instead allows the tension and resolution of the story to occur in the minds of the characters, and, in the last paragraph, a clever, biting, satisfying indication of the future of the couple. Too Close Together remains thematically close to You Do Understand while also striking out on its own. The theme of war, though present primarily as a backdrop, allows for a certain concentration of feeling and an intensity of emotional extrapolation that was not present in the primarily middle-class, peaceful stories from You Do Understand. An excellent addition to an oeuvre which is finally slowly appearing in English.

Too Close Together by Andrej Blatnik is a short story from Absinthe: New European Writing - Issue 1

See Also

Other titles by Andrej Blatnik under review include:
---You Do Understand

Other stories from the Absinthe: New European Writing - Issue 1 include:
---Ferić, Zoran – Make a Doctor Run - Make a Doctor Run

Index of short stories under review from Absinthe: New European Writing - Issue 14
Index of short stories under review from Absinthe: New European Writing - Issue 13: Spotlight on Romania
Index of short stories under review